M+E Daily

At the Nov. 10 SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit, presented by Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH), Kellie Hodge, principle design researcher for Sutherland Labs, will ask what seems like a simple question: who exactly are we designing for?

“At Sutherland Labs, we have been thinking about the ways in which certain types of people and facets of experience are overrepresented in research and design practice, to the exclusion of others,” Hodge said. “The good news is that we can drastically improve inclusion through quite simple measures. And the even better news is that we can learn much from the ingenuity of people who have traditionally been underserved by industry. As we see it, if someone is putting a product to work for them despite that it wasn’t designed with them in mind, they have a use case worth understanding.”

Her presentation will ask what does more inclusive technology offer all of us? Through a series of vignettes from the field, she’ll examine how exclusion can become embedded in practice optimized for tight release schedules and make people wary of risk. Hodge will share what practitioners, strategists and leaders in the experience industry can do about that.

“I’m a design researcher, which makes me a kind of messenger. I help organizations understand the people they serve by showing up on doorsteps (or these days, on screens) and spending hours listening to them. The insights I help define come from the bottom up,” Hodge said. “I hope that attendees — whether they’re practitioners, strategists or leaders — come away with two or three simple actions that will deliver change immediately.”

The SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit is designed to inform, engage, and inspire attendees, with a focus on diversity, leadership, and technology issues, especially as it relates to the effects of the pandemic.

The half-day, closed-door event runs from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT, and will feature presentations and breakout sessions tackling the impact of bias, both human and algorithmic. The 2020 edition of the SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit saw more than 250 attendees, with more than 70 percent representing the media and entertainment industry and tech-adjacent companies. The event is sponsored by Sutherland, Premiere Digital, Solliance and Converge Technology Solutions.

For regular program updates, visit the event website here. To register, click here.

To sponsor SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit 2020, contact Evie Silvers at [email protected], or Garrett Finley at [email protected].